Tread carefully through cyberspace. You don’t know who you might meet
14 May 2012 17 Comments
Did you ever want to cast off? Did you ever want to sail into the sunset with someone you just met; a kindred spirit, a twin soul, leaving everything behind? It is possible in the virtual world of the Internet, which can become a comfort zone you’ll never want to leave. And then you might want to meet that person with whom you have become strangely intimate. But reality is never as lovely as the dream. Be careful what you wish for…
That’s the very first paragraph of Virtual Strangers, a romantic suspense novel I co-wrote with Ola Zaltin, an author who I met in the virtual world of a writers’ site.
At the time, I was only just dipping my toe into the deep, dark waters of the Internet, that ‘place’ that is not physical, not ‘real’ but still so much part of our existence these days. But then, when I was just discovering cyberspace, I was completely unaware of its powers or its addictive qualities. I had no idea that you can actually get to know someone and become close friends simply by chatting online. Nor did I know that you can get attacked and seriously upset by trolls and other nasty people who use the written world as a very effective weapon. All this I discovered very quickly and I experienced all of the above. As a writer, I found this fascinating and thought I would one day write a novel on this subject.
Ola and I became virtual friends very quickly, probably because we were both Swedes living abroad, even though I am a novelist and he is a very talented script writer with an impressive career. We spent something like a year chatting on this site, where Ola so elegantly dismissed the bullies that tried to virtually attack me. We also had a kind of ‘gang’ of writers who sparked off each other and spent entire evenings exchanging highly amusing repartee. Then Ola and I met in real life and he became a real person to me and a real, very close friend and collaborator. I don’t think we could have worked together had we not me in the flesh. But that was much later and we were already working together online.
As we developed the plot and connected on Facebook, I began to realise that this virtual socialising is very seductive and that it can become a kind of escape from the dreariness of one’s real life. This made me think that it would be interesting to explore the question of real versus virtual life and how some people possibly create a completely different online persona to that of their real life. My heroine, Annika, is just such a person, seeking an escape from her own horrible reality and creating an online, other ‘self’ that has a more interesting life. She gets the socialising she lacks from her virtual friends and foolishly connects with all the wrong people with frightening and disastrous results.
Cyberspace is a kind of digital sub-culture where many of us ‘live’. Ask yourself this question: Are you better looking online? Younger? Happier? More popular? Are you better educated and have a slightly better standard of living? Of course not, you are totally honest, just like everybody else…
When Ola and I discussed the plot of the book, we felt we wanted to bring in that threat on a personal level that can often be felt on the Internet. We wanted to make the readers feel were looking at them through their window as they sit at their computer in their underwear or pyjamas. We also wanted to create a story where virtual life spills into the real world. As it probably often does.
And… you really should get dressed. That dressing gown isn’t very becoming…
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Being International
08 Mar 2012 1 Comment
Today is International Women’s day. While I know (just in case someone feels they need to explain this to me) that it means that we celebrate women all over the world, it was the word ‘international’ that struck me most. International. Inter-national. World wide. Multinational. Belonging to many countries yet not really belonging anywhere. Always being the odd one out, the one who comes from somewhere else, the Swede (in my case) or (when I go back home) the woman who left Sweden to become Irish.
When I grew up, I was encouraged to learn languages, to travel and discover other countries and their cultures. My parents traveled extensively and had friends from all over the world who would come for visits from time to time. During those visits, the house would ring with foreign voices, lively conversations and often singing and strange music. My father spoke at least five languages fluently and read books in them all.
I went to a very international school, where I mixed with children of very different races and backgrounds. This was natural to me and now that I think back on my school days, I realise how rich it made me. It also taught me from an early age to look at the person, not the nationality or colour. During summer holidays, I was sent to France and England to improve my language skills. It was a very enriching experience which made me feel at home in many countries and a great help later on, when I married a diplomat and started a globe trotting life that was to take me all over the world. It made me strong and able to cope anywhere in any situation.
A rolling stone gathers no moss. Or, in my case, a travelling woman gathers few friends. I don’t by this mean to say that I don’t have any friends. I do. Very close, dear friends. But they don’t live nearby. They live in America, Italy and Sweden. I have to make an effort to se them and they have to do the same to see me. While, in this new Internet age, we communicate by e-mail and on Facebook and I have many online friends that are very dear to me, real life friendships will never go out of fashion.
It is only since we left diplomatic life and settled in rural Ireland that it has struck me that I don’t really belong anywhere. Or maybe it’s old age creeping up? Or maybe, because people around here are so settled, having lived here for generations that I feel more foreign then ever? They don’t need to widen their circles, as they have their families and the people they grew up with all around them. Friendships that span twenty, thirty years and more are things I can’t compete with. Not that they are not very friendly. They are. Nice and helpful and generous. But there isn’t that complicity or that natural acceptance that you would have with someone who has been around since birth.
I go to Sweden often now, where I can see my friends and family, those who really know me, people I have a history with, who truly understand me and to whom I don’t have to explain anything. They just know what I mean instinctively because they have the same points of reference.
My international-ness has also been a stumbling block in my writing career. Publishers in Ireland hesitated about my books because they weren’t Irish enough. UK publishers thought they were ‘too Irish’ sometimes and at other times ‘not anchored in any country’. I never thought about that until it was pointed out to me. My books are set mainly in France and also in Sweden and they often have that globe trotting aspect, where the protagonists travel from one place to the other. I think of myself as a ‘continental’ because I feel so at home in continental Europe. I can walk around Paris, Brussels or Rome without even thinking that I am in a foreign country.
When I mingle with other writers on forums and in writer’s groups on Facebook, I realise that I am truly the odd woman out there. I sometimes find that my fellow authors misunderstand me and put another meaning into what I really want to say, which has nothing to do with language but a different way of thinking. This is quite interesting but can be frustrating too.
I write in English but I probably have a non-English/American ‘voice’. This may or may not be a plus, adding a little extra spice to a story or a turn of phrase. But it could also put people off, which might be the reason for some negative reviews. People who have not had my experience and who have never traveled might be confused and puzzled by some of the stories or way of thinking.
What do I know? I’m just a Swede lost in space.
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Sugar and spice and all things nice? Or mean and sassy?
01 Feb 2012 2 Comments
Should heroines be like this… Or like this?
The women in my stories are nearly always strong-willed and assertive, standing up to bullies and never stuck for an answer. Smartass bitches? At times, yes. To me, this makes a story a lot more interesting and dialogue fun to write. The result is, perhaps, not to everyone’s taste, as I have discovered from reactions by some readers to my romantic comedy, Fresh Powder.
‘Mean, rude women’ they say, ‘unlikable heroines’. This rather surprised me as I find sweet, submissive women a huge yawn and will invariably stop reading a book populated by these insipid creatures.
The modern woman, I thought, is more assertive than her older sisters, more independent and strong. My characters often find themselves in situations where they have to fight to survive and elbow themselves up the career ladder. Kicking ass is sometimes the only way out of sticky situations. A lot of heroines in modern fiction do behave like this. Take Lisbet Salander, for instance, heroine of the Larsson trilogies. Sweet and kind? No! Not someone I would like to cross swords with but one of the most popular heroines in fiction these days.
Which do you prefer?
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Apropos ‘The Myth of the Bestseller’ by Joe Konrath
20 Jan 2012 14 Comments
I just read a brilliant post by Joe Konrath on his blog ‘A Newbie’s Guide to Self Publishing’, where he says, so rightly, that being a bestselling author is not what the e-book revolution is all about for the self-published author, but selling steadily and in enough numbers to create extra income and above all, the satisfaction of being read by many. Never before have so many authors been able to sell their self-published work, or been recognised, respected and appreciated the way they are now. And never before have authors been able to get paid for their hard work and not have to share their royalties with publishers and agents, often getting the smallest cut of the profit. THAT is the real miracle and we all have a share in it, readers and writers alike.
As a reader, I have an infinite number of good books to chose from for a reasonable price. As a writer, I have no deadlines or publicity schedules in the form of book talks, signings or interviews with the local press and radio stations. I can sit at home, in my nightie, and write, publish and market as much or as little as I choose. Less stress and more freedom to create work without having a publisher or agent tell me ‘this won’t sell’ are, to me, the more positive things about my new life as a self-published author. Naturally, there are many people out there who sneer at self-published books, saying that ‘anyone can upload rubbish now’. Of course they can, but it’s up to the discerning reader to sniff out the good from the bad. And that is part of the fun.
I found Konrath’s post so inspirational and encouraging because my story is just that; selling all my books steadily and getting what I would consider an income, without making headlines or being mentioned as ‘the most successful’ or ‘selling by the million’. I did flirt with the bestseller list briefly last summer, when my winter romance, Fresh Powder, started to sell like crazy, with 10000 sold by the end of august. But then sales began to slow down and it is now selling in what I would call normal amounts, as are all my 9 e-books. Not exciting but very satisfying.
In the two years since I uploaded my first e-book, I have, in no particular order, sold a considerable amount of books (around 20000), managed to get noticed in the vast ocean of indie authors, gained a number of wonderful writer friends, some of whom I consider real gems, and been in close contact with my readers all over the world. Not to mention all I have learned about formatting and cover design, which have been fun and stimulating (if a little frustrating at times). None of which happened when I was a traditionally published author.
In addition, I have to say that I am very grateful to Joe Konrath and other bloggers, who have raised the profile of self-publishing and given so many of us writers the courage to believe in ourselves. The generosity of many successful authors who have shared their experiences and given tips and written ‘how-to’ material in blogs and books is truly impressive. My heartfelt thanks go to them and to readers who, with their enthusiasm and encouragement, keep us authors inspired to write our stories.
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A Place Called ‘the Zone’.
27 Jul 2011 2 Comments
Most authors will know what I mean when I say ‘I’m in the zone’. It’s not a physical place or even some website out there in cyberspace- it’s a state of mind.
Writing is time consuming, frustrating and bloody hard work most of the time. It can also destroy your self confidence, as you sit there trying your best and only trite comes out. You can write 2000 words and then maybe only one hundred of those words are fairly good. In fact if that happens, you’re lucky. I have often deleted a whole chapter after re reading what I wrote the day before and then discovered that it was all complete drivel. You can be halfway through a novel and read back, only to discover that the whole idea is without substance or any worth at all. It can make you feel truly miserable.
Then why do we do it? Because of ‘the zone’. When you do get there, it’s like hitting cruising speed, or the sweet spot of the tennis racket and the story unfolds right in front of you. You are, at that moment freewheeling and a true winner and it’s a wonderful feeling.
For me, when I hit the zone, it’s as if my computer screen becomes a magic mirror that I step through and I’m in the world of my story and inside the skin of my character- in fact I am the character and I know exactly how he or she feels at that moment. It happens without warning and you don’t realise it until you have written for a while and then you go- ‘hey, I’m in the zone’.
It happened to me this morning. I am, at the moment writing the sequel to my historical novel, A Woman’s Place and the story takes place in New York in the 1930’s. I was having a hard time getting myself in the frame of mind of the heroine, Sonja, and I have been struggling with a certain chapter all week, getting quite sick of it. But I made myself read through the earlier chapters and then I started writing the current one. I thought, as this is the first draft, I’d just move the story forward, filling in the emotions and improving dialogue later, during draft 2. So I plodded along, describing a rather dreary November day when… Wheee! I was there! Suddenly, Sonja spoke to me and I could feel her pulling her cardigan tighter around her thin body, braving the cold weather. Then I was her, thinking her thoughts, feeling her emotions and smelling the air in her apartment (she had burnt the toast) on the Upper East Side of New York in 1937. I even made her change her shoes for her walk in Central Park, as my feet suddenly felt cold.
My ‘zone moment’ lasted for over an hour and I wrote like a mad woman, completing nearly 2000 words. Great words. Absolutely perfect words for that particular chapter. Then I had to stop for mundane things like breakfast, a shower and getting dressed. But the afterglow lasted nearly all day. It’s a kind of high that hits you at random. If you could bottle it and sell it, you’d make millions.
When will I get back into the zone? I have no idea. Could happen very soon or in a week’s time or a month. But I do know the only way back there, is to keep writing.
No, I’m not insane. I’m a writer.
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How I really feel about BAD reviews!!!!!
22 Jun 2011 15 Comments
When I get bad reviews, I just shrug them off. It’s part of being an author and everyone gets them, I say. Then I go into my room, lock the door and I go through several stages:
Stage one:
stage two
Stage three:
Stage four;
Finally, stage five, writing again in the ‘I’ll show the bastards’-mode:
Thank goodness for the writing addiction.
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Danny Gillan tackles Internet forums the Glaswegian way.
20 Apr 2011 12 Comments
Today, my guest blogger is Danny Gillan, author of the brilliant new novel Scratch, which I have just finished reading and can highly recommend. Read his unique (to say the least) take on e-book publishing, his own style of marketing and how he tackles the ‘profanity clause’ on the Amazon forums by inventing some new words.
Kindling an Interest
Many thanks to Susanne for inviting me here to have a moan and a grumble, I mean write a balanced and objective blog post.
Yep, I’ve jumped on the Kindle bandwagon. Enticed by tales of thousands of sales and generous royalty rates, I recently stuck up my second novel, Scratch, and sat back, waiting for the cheques to roll in.
I did it for various reasons. Or at least I could pretend I did. My experience with ‘traditional’ publishing didn’t go too well with my first novel, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, so I could say that’s what put me off this route and made me go out on my own. I could also say that my writing is far too unique and experimental to find a place on celeb hungry trad publishers’ lists. I could even say that I’m joining the band of hardy pioneers blazing a trail into the ‘new’ publishing model because I’m all cool and stuff. I could say all of that, but it would be bollocks (especially the ‘unique and experimental’ thing).
I put Scratch on Kindle for two reasons and two reasons only. I’m lazy, and I’m skint. I want some easy money, and I want it on a monthly basis – a modest second income to supplement my extremely modest first income. Not too much to ask, surely? So, to achieve this, do I spend months (or years) sending samples out and failing to get an agent, or do I put the book on Kindle for relatively little expense or effort? Guess which one I chose.
So, what now? The book is there, it’s got a good cover, it’s a reasonable price, it’s not the worst book ever written. When does the cash arrive? Seriously, when?
That’s when the ‘lazy’ bit started falling apart. I quickly learned from other writers that, to get any kind of buzz going about the book, I would have to dive headlong into the world of self-promotion and, more specifically, the Amazon Kindle Forums. ‘Get your name known’. ‘Take part in discussions’. ‘Look for threads with people who’d like your writing style and genre’. All sounds fair enough. ‘But, whatever you do, don’t push the book too obviously’. Huh?
I quickly learned there is a highly vocal and significantly large number of Kindle Forum contributors who actively, and sometimes viciously, dislike authors who use the forums to promote their book(s). This seemed a bit odd to me, but again, fair enough. Apparently the best strategy is to simply become a regular forum user and hope that sales will be achieved through some sort of osmosis. A bit like Bruce Lee’s technique of ‘fighting without fighting’ (wee Scratch reference, there), we must master the art of ‘promoting without promoting’. I’ve barely mastered the art of feeding myself, so this was a daunting prospect.
But, needs must. So, armed with a bottle of red wine and a willingness to make friends with complete strangers for entirely selfish purposes, I found what seemed like a relatively ‘author friendly’ thread on the Amazon US forum and said hello. I even got away with mentioning Scratch a few times. It was all going very well and I was pleased with these early efforts. A few people even said they’d download a sample of the book. Excellent! This was going to be easy. There were a few users who seemed to be a bit cheeky about each other for no reason I could fathom, but that happens everywhere.
I had some fun making up new swear words to get round Amazon’s ‘decency’ policies (I am Glaswegian). I joked I could become the thread ‘bouncer’ to fend off trolls. It was all very jolly. Then I noticed that the ‘cheeky’ stuff was getting a bit personal between some users. Hmm, I thought. Why are they ripping into each other like that? I did a little digging and discovered that I had inadvertently landed myself smack in the middle of one of the fabled ‘flame wars’ of which legends tell, between two competing factions from different threads who had seemingly been involved in a prolonged and bloody battle for months. Oops. I then had a wee look at the other camp’s ‘home’ thread to discover I had apparently been added to numerous people’s ‘do not buy’ lists because of the made up swearing and the fact they thought I was taking sides. Again, oops. I did what all decent, honourable people would do is such circumstances and ran away, never to return.
So, not the best start, after all. I learned a valuable lesson on that strange, corpse-strewn night, though – people take this shit awful seriously. For me, the internet has always been about trying out jokes and taking the piss out of my online mates as they do the same back to me. Not on Amazon, it seems. Oh no. I’ve since been far more reticent to jump in, all ‘farktwits’ blazing. I just respond to anyone who asks me a question and try to mention Scratch when I think I can pretend it’s relevant to the discussion. Then go back to Facebook to have a swear, take the piss and try out jokes.
It’s not so easy, this self-promotion thing. The slightly baffling factor, though, is that I sold more copies in theUS that night than on any since. Maybe I should have kept calling people ‘bastiging iceholes’ and making enemies, after all. Dunno.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand. When does the cash arrive?
***************************************************************
Meet Danny on hos own amazing blog.
He is also the deputy editor of Words With Jam, an informative online magazine for readers and writers.
You can download ‘Scratch’ both at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
How to profit from crime without being arrested, explained by Ruby Barnes
17 Apr 2011 5 Comments
In order to jazz up my blog, I decided to invite some fellow writers to share their journeys to publication. Today’s guest blogger is new and exciting crime writer Ruby Barnes, author of Peril, a crime novel with a very unusual hero, set in Dublin. This is his take on writing crime:
Crime pays
A truism, whatever way you look at it.
Real crime pays. If there’s financial gain. Getting caught is the problem. That’s the hair in the ointment. Plus the old dilemma of social conscience.
Fictional crime, on the other hand, is another matter. Writing a crime novel, a good crime novel, can pay – if the work is worthy, if the author has a following and can gain exposure, if the author’s slice of the profit is healthy enough. A lot of ‘ifs’. But here are the facts: crime and romance are the two dominant fiction genres in Amazon’s kindle charts, US and UK. That’s not why I chose to write crime, however. If people buy and enjoy my work then of course it makes a little birdhouse in my soul, but the choice of genre isn’t commercially driven. It evolved. Honest.
When I started writing novels, the process of writing delighted me. The novelist, like the entrepreneur, had been buried deep within me for forty years and I had looked for a catalyst to liberate that author from my compound being. A day job had dragged me around the globe, from one factory to another, all cast from the same mould, an exercise in globalisation that MacDonald’s would have been proud of. What I brought back with me wasn’t that a widget inMalaysia was built the same as one in Brazil or Norway. My souvenirs were observations. The roll-mop herring of Scandinavia, the Churasco meat grill of South America, the exotic sea food of the Far East. Okay, I like my food. But there were other things. People, places, events, theories, poverty, disease, crime, death, music, relationships. Beer.
Liam at tea break in theWaterford factory said ‘All them stories! You should write a book, so you should. Like yer man over there on the production line. Wrote one about Exeter City Football Club. Lovely, ‘tis.’
This, and other comments were perhaps the catalyst, the final push, that got me started. After three years of carbon negative jet set life I took my tea break muse at face value. And I found I couldn’t stop. The result was a novel like no other, an action adventure extravaganza of international blockbusting intrigue. Innovative energy technology, European Union corruption, African AIDS conspiracy and US evangelical apocalypse. Tom Clancy and Leon Uris eat your hearts out. Apart from a plot that contained enough material for a trilogy, and the likely target market consisting mostly of male electrical engineers, I had it sussed. Literary agents across the UK and Ireland endured my first fifty pages, enclosed in folders with pictures of puppies and kittens, covering letters fragranced with Fahrenheit by Christian Dior (a delicate hint of summer cucumber). How could they resist? They did.
Unperturbed by rejection letters, I threw myself into the sequel and migrated the European populace into a newly fertile African continent as they fled an encroaching ice age. It was highly derivative in parts, but I experienced the full emotions of each scene, shedding tears of anguish, happiness, sadness. A lot of tears.
I knew that these two novels were an exorcism. Well, I didn’t know that at the start but towards the end of the first it became clear. Both books would have pride of place in that under-the-bed archive. I threw myself at book number three with a conscious decision to pull plot, characters and settings into something more manageable. More focused. It would be around a central character, an anti-hero.
A perfect premise for the novel presented itself. I’d just started a new job in Dublin, commuting daily from Kilkenny. The crowds, sights and smells were alien and evocative. I came across a crippled beggar on Heuston bridge, and his twin. Women in Eastern European garb making the sign of the cross at car windows for small change. Criminal gangs and an addict beggar found beaten to death in the city. It all came together. I still had no idea what narrative voice was, how to write natural dialogue, that the senses must be titillated and in all these things a modern stylistic minimalism and far, far, fewer commas, were en vogue. Half way through what had become a crime novel, my wife spotted a college course run by the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Kilkenny Campus, and I took my middle-aged- married twice- ragtime blues- guitar playing-masters in business- ass down to Hogwarts.
This penchant for crime has an organic origin. My family have always had a problem with authority. Team player is a phrase that I use at job interviews with fingers crossed behind my back. I’m a loner who breaks whatever rules he dares to on a sliding scale of seriousness and dreams of being an outcast. First the written felony through misuse of commas, colons, semicolons and sentence structure in general. Then the righteous beating of offenders who hang toilet paper with the dangly bit towards the wall (should be away from it). Defending the honour of ladies by extracting lethal vengeance against insults (fisticuffs with gypsies). Waging poison vendettas against perceived slights. Burying troublesome in-laws under the patio. Delivering a coup de grace to end the suffering of perpetrators and victims alike. This is my natural mode of thought. Writing PERIL provided the first avenue of real release. It was a painful road. I had to drop the Dickensian delivery, bring it up to the present in tone and tense, and draw in the reader with an alternating first person narrative. The result is Marmite, love it or hate it, but undeniably savoury. It’s quirky. I’ve committed a quirky crime.
What next? THE BAPTIST. More crime, of course. This time even more claustrophobic. First person but an unreliable narrator. Mentally ill, committing a lifetime of extreme crime against society. Cleansing the world of evil in preparation for the One. Pursued by the same detective that brought about the downfall in PERIL. There’s still a place for humour but it’s that of the gallows.
If I crawl under the bed and resurrect those early works from the dust and spiders then it will be to address the huge crimes committed by nations and allies. But crime on that scale is too large for me, it belongs to those who would preach. I want a smaller sphere within which individuals break rules and pay the price. If caught. I need to sense the victims’ despair, recoil from the sweat of a perpetrator trying to avoid capture, see the destruction of relationships betrayed by ill deeds and feel the touch of justice, the rod of retribution.
The future is clear for Ruby Barnes. There’s a world of misbehaviour to be committed. Taboos, laws of man and nature. Society must be rendered, its constituent parts ripped by a catalyst. The sinister chemistry of crime.
Meet Ruby Barnes on his highly entertaining blog and look him up on his Facebook page
Never mind the sales figures, read my books!
01 Apr 2011 2 Comments
Reading Irish author Catherine Ryan Howard’s recent blogpost about her e-book sales, I saw that she has sold in all, over one year 3,969 copies of her book Mousetrapped ( an amusing tale of her year working at Disney World in Orlando). Catherine has, since the start of her e-book venture, shared her experiences on her blog, which was the whole idea from the start; self publishing and then blogging every step of the way of her journey, good or bad. I have heard a lot about Catherine, often billed as Ireland’s answer to Joe Konrath and have been observing her self-publishing success. My own sales are maybe three times that of Catherine’s but there is a reason for that.
Before I go on, I should perhaps explain that Catherine Ryan Howard is selling only one book in the non-fiction genre. I have e-published seven books to date, all fiction in four different genres: Chick-lit, Contemporary women’s fiction, historical/literary and crime, which explains the big difference in our sales.
I think Konrath is safe – for the moment – from both of us. Catherine’s book is very good and she deserves to sell ten times what she has sold already. Her fame shows, though, that clever use of social networking and word of mouth rumours are very powerful tools.
I have not been as diligent. While I have been happily chatting online, announcing good sales figures and generally thinking I was being quite shamelss in my promotions, I realise this has been a mere whisper compared to Catherine’s marketing campaign.
I began e-publishing a year or so ago, starting with my self-published novel Swedish for Beginners. When that novel took off straight away, with 198 copies sold the first month, I decided to also e-publish three of my previously published novels, and then, later on in the year, a historical novel and a romantic comedy that had never been published but was sitting in my computer, ready to go. I published my co-written detective story, Virtual Strangers in the beginning of March and it is already selling well with some excellent reveiws. To date, I have published seven e-books (all my e-books can be found here).
It’s difficult to assess any book’s sales, as its place in the charts change hourly. A sale or three will immediatly get the book up the charts, only to sink again if there are no sales for a couple of days or even hours. But if a book is constantly in the top 200-300 or so you can take it that it’s selling really well. This is the case with my romantic comedy, Fresh Powder’, which has been selling at a steady rate on Amazon.co.uk for over four months now. The figures show that this book alone has sold 574 copies in March. Incidentally, I have no idea why this particular book is doing so well, as I have done next to no promotions for it.
All authors have to do some marketing and the amount you do will impact on sales. Where and how you do it is something you have to figure out and also how much time you want to spend using social networks, blogs and forums. The writer becomes his or her own publicist and can find that the marketing eats up time that should be spent writing. I am a writer first and a publicist second. Ideally, I would just like to sit in my little room and write, which is what I used to do before the Internet explosion happened. It’s easy to get hooked on checking sales figures and looking up forums for possible promotions, which will lure you away from the daily slog of writing and editing. It’s also hard not to look at other author’s sales and feel envious of some who have managed to get ahead in the charts.
The publishing world has gone through a metamorphosis in the past few years and the self-published, or ‘indie’, author is now gaining ground. The e-book market is growing rapidly and right now, there is a window of opportunity for the enterprising indie author. E-books have no shelf life and if you manage to make that all important platform, you have a chance to elbow yourself into an increasingly crowded market.
Hard work? Yes. I only wish I could sit in my little room and write.
Adventures on the Internet – How I Met Trolls and got into Flame Wars.
26 Mar 2011 9 Comments
Virtual attack
My recently co-written detective story Virtual Strangers (find it on my e-book page), describes how participating on Internet forums can kill. This is fiction but in real life, being active on the internet, blogging and chatting with people you have never met can be both frightening and enlightening.
The novel came about after a long stint on a website for writers, where I met my now partner in crime, Ola Zaltin. I think we were both forum novices then and soon got sucked into the addictive and seductive habit of Internet chatting. To me, it was wonderful to find friends always ‘there’, during long winter evenings of working on my novels. Writing is a lonely business and being able to communicate with fellow authors makes a welcome break from staring at your own text for hours.
It was not always so nice, however and it didn’t take long before the trolls started to appear. I was introduced to the concept of ‘flame wars’ during an attack on me that came out of nowhere. It appears that there are people out there in cyberspace, whose only entertainment is verbally abusing perfectly nice people and the fun is of course intensified if you try to fight back. As a novice, I was dreadfully upset and imagined that these people could find out where I live and then come and knock on my door. Silly notion, of course, but as a beginner, I actually thought they were after me and didn’t understand that it wasn’t ‘me’ they were after but anyone who showed any signs of weakness or upset. I soon realised that the only thing to do is not to respond and just leave whatever forum the attack took place.
When I was first attacked, I reported the abuse to the forum moderators, thinking they’d ban the attackers and then all would be well. But nothing much happened. I slowly realised that cyber bullies or ‘troll’s are very common on the Internet and part and parcel of participating in forums. You just have to shrug the attacks off and try not to get upset. There are far more really nice people than trolls in any case, and if you let a few bad apples ruin the pie, they will have won.
Easier said than done, though. As a self published e-book author, it is necessary to promote your books on forums where you will find lots of readers. I have been participating in such forums for over a year now and have been attacked over and over again by these cyberbullies. Some of it has been partly my own fault, as I am a very chatty person and love to take part in all sorts of threads. I have also actively (a little too actively, perhaps) promoted my books and mostly gained readers and friends, some of whom I am in touch with on a daily basis.
But the trolls are always there, ready to pounce. Those who know me in real life, might be surprised to learn that I am ‘an abusive liar’ who has a ‘cabal’. I am a more used to these attacks now and I know most people who are active on the Internet occasionlly get attacked in the same way. Especially self published authors, or ‘indies’ as we are called.
That’s the way it is and there is nothing I, or anyone else can do about it. ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’ they say. Which is true. If cyberbullying gets to you, stay away from the Internet. So I try to take it on the chin, even if some of the more insane behavior gets to me at times. It’s creepy and scary.
But I can’t stay away. Recent events have given me fantastic material for the next ‘Virtual’ novel.
It’s going to be even more frightening than the first.
Incidentally, ‘Virtual Strangers’ got the thumbs up from the famous book blogger Big Al (of ‘The Greek Seaman’ fame)
